To discuss with these modules, I have bought a cheap USB to ZWave controller. It might have been indeed a bit too cheap, since it came without any documentation. Once plugged-in, Windows was able to suggest to download a driver for the Prolific PL2303 usb to serial adapter. Afterward, the system recognized the controller as a standard COM port.

I have downloaded Homeseer trial, and was able to easily associate everything together. However, the price for this software is not cheap, and will need either a Windows computer or dedicated hardware to run. This did not make sense for me, especially since I do own a nice Synology NAS already running 24h/24.

A nice group of people is working actively on making an open source implementation of ZWave. The project is called OpenZWave and can be found on Googlecode. It is still stated to be in alpha stages, but already worked pretty nice. It was pretty easy to have everything working on Windows, however, it has been more tricky on the Synology. The software requires libudev or libusb1.0 for the HIDAPI implementation, both of which are not available for the Synology. It is probably possible to compile these using the toolchains provided, but there is a much simple solution if you are using a simple COM port controller.

Note on which TTY your adapter is mapped. If for some reason /dev/ttyUSB* does not exists on your system, you can create it using the following:

mknod /dev/ttyUSB0 c 188 0

2) Modify the Makefiles and Sources

- Remove every reference to HIDAPI that you can find in the makefiles

- In Driver.cpp, also remove the inclusion and reference to HIDAPI.

- I also had to add a newline character at the end of 3 or 4 source files.

- Edit Main.cpp to ensure it uses the same ttyUSB on which your adapter is connected.

You can cross-compile on the same system that was used to build the modules. If like myself you have one of these newer NAS with an ATOM processor, it is perfectly possible to compile directly on it. Donâ€™t expect it to be fast, but it works

From this point, you can experiment with your ZWave system on your Synology NAS.